Search results for ""Author Giancarla Periti""
Yale University Press In the Courts of Religious Ladies: Art, Vision, and Pleasure in Italian Renaissance Convents
This fascinating study considers the poetic and mythological artworks made for elite female monastic communities in Renaissance Italy. Nuns from the patrician class, who often disregarded obligations of austerity and poverty, commissioned sensually appealing, richly made artifacts inspired by contemporary courtly culture. The works of art transformed monastic parlors, abbatial apartments, and nuns’ cells into ornate settings, thereby enriching and complicating the opposition of religious and worldly spheres. This unconventional monastic and yet courtly decoration was a new form of art in the way it entangled the sacred and the profane. The artwork was intended to edify both intellectually and spiritually, as well as to delight and seduce the viewer. Based on extensive new research into primary sources, this generously illustrated book introduces a thriving female monastic visual culture that ecclesiastical authorities endeavored to suppress. It shows how this art taught its viewers to use their eyes to gain insights about the secular world beyond the convent walls.
£47.50
Officina Libraria The Network of Cassinese Arts in Renaissance Italy
From the late 15th to the mid-16th century, an impressive corpus of architecture, sculpture, and painting was created to embellish monastic sites affiliated with the Benedictine Cassinese Congregation of Italy. A religious order of humanistically trained monks, the Cassinese engaged with the most eminent artists and architects of the early modern period, supporting the production of imagery and architecture that was often highly experimental in nature: from Raphael's Sistine Madonna in Piacenza to Andrea Riccio's Moses/Zeus Ammon, from Andrea Palladio's church of San Giorgio Maggiore (Venice) to the superbly crafted choirstalls of San Severino and Sossio (Naples). Applying a network framework to the congregation's infrastructure of monasteries makes clear that the circulation of sophisticated Renaissance art and architecture constituted only a segment of the monks' investment in the arts. Monks also served as custodians of an antique monumental heritage and popular votive images, assuring the survival of ancient buildings and artifacts of limited aesthetic value that supplied opportunities for early modern masters to confront an array of artworks for the reinvention of reformed Christian art and architecture. Text in English, Italian and German.
£31.50
